Cisco CTO Warrior: Software-Only SDN Has ‘Limitations’ Page 2

Businesses want their infrastructures to enable them to more quickly run new services and applications, more easily manage them and to scale as the application demands. Such business needs are best met by tightly integrated software and hardware, she said.

Warrior’s comments echo concerns that some analysts also have about NSX.

“One of the limitations of NSX is that it does try to do everything in software,” Kerravala said, adding that such an approach may be good for such jobs as creating overlays, but makes it more difficult to do such tasks as security.

That is where VMware’s partnerships come in, from networking hardware from HP, Dell and Juniper to solutions with HP and Brocade that will help offer unified visibility into physical and virtual environments to alliances with security firms McAfee, Symantec and TrendMicro.

"We're going to do everything in our power to continue to build the partnership we have with Cisco," VMware CEO Pat Gelsinger told eWEEK. "We've had great success in many areas with them. NSX is going to be a great platform for Cisco infrastructure. I'll point out that the customers we had on stage [at one of the VMworld keynotes]—those are big Cisco customers running NSX in their Cisco environments.”

Gelsinger said that whatever API or SDN service Cisco offers, it will be supported in NSX.

“Because the more value that they deliver in a programmatic way through the infrastructure, the more value we can give to our shared customers,” he said.

Chris Preimesberger, editor of Features & Analysis at eWEEK, contributed to this article.